Well, another crime writer to add to my list of those I must read. This writer, John Dunning, has been recommended to me by fellow bloggers Patternings and Ex Libris whose opinion I value highly, so ever eager to find more Crime and Detection books, I ordered Booked to Die and it arrived a couple of days ago, and oh dear here I go again.
I initially thought of calling 2006 the Year of the Detective but perhaps it should be The Year of Living Dangerously (think this is a film title, Mel Gibson comes to mind...) as looking through my list of books I have read this year there is a predominance of Crime: Ruth Rendell, P D James, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Andrea Camilleri, Donna Leon and now John Dunning.
Ruth Rendell and P D James have two wonderful detectives in Inspector Wexford and Adam Dalgleish, Agatha Christie has the inimitable Hercule Poirot (they have been repeating all these on TV recently and have caught up on them all) and Miss Marple, Ngaio Marsh has the gorgeous Roderick Alleyn, Donna Leon has the sexy Italian, Guido Brunetti, who loves his wife and his pasta, and Andrea Camilleri has - who? I cannot remember. This writer impressed me the least out of all those I read this year.
Now I come to John Dunning with his hardbitten detective Cliff Janeway. The books are set in Denver which surprised me somewhat until I thought why? Denver is just as likely to have a detective as any other big American city, just somehow one expects American detective stories to be set in New York, which is totally illogical. Of course, I know why. Over the last 20 years I have read the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain, all of which are set in a thinly disguised Big Apple and very good they are too. Ed McBain is, of course, the pen name of Evan Hunter who sprang to fame in the late 1950s with his then shocking novel, Blackboard Jungle. Sadly, he died recently. Over the years we have all grown very fond of the major characters in this precinct, Steve Carella and his beautiful deaf mute wife, Bert Kling with the tragic murder of his fiance, Meyer Meyer and all the other assorted members of the station. They were gritty and realistic, sexy and also sardonically funny and I shall miss them.
John Dunning's creation is Cliff Janeway, a cop who loves books. Well, what more do you want from a detective novel? (OK in Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon we had murder, the opera and Venice, things don't get much better than that but this one runs it close). In Booked to Die Cliff decides to take revenge on a vicious thug, probably a killer but one who is avoiding the law, and deliberately throws his career away. He then decides to do what he has always wanted to do, become a bookseller. The first murder is that of a book scout who has got himself mixed up in a book scam and got too greedy and wanted a cut for himself. So we have Death among the Bookstacks and two people wind up dead in the back of the bookshop. Involved is a mysterious wealthy, glamorous woman who lives in a house at the top of a hill and emerges to hit the bookshops in town and buy up first editions. Who is she? does she have anything to do with the murders?
When the book first started I was not sure I was going to like it, it felt a bit too self-consciously gritty and super slick but as the story got going and the books began to take centre stage, I found myself slowly drawn in until I could not put it down until I had finished it. It is clear that Cliff Janeway is going to become an American Lord Peter Wimsey, somebody who will keep investigating as a sideline while doing other things, in this case, selling books.
The author was himself a former rare-book dealer so he obviously knows what he is talking about and I now fear I am going to have to go and buy the rest of this series (there would appear to be about 8) and off I go on another binge.
